Need a movie to keep you company until you literally can't keep your eyes open? Join us tonight when we pass out to Jerry Maguire [starting @ 1:10 a.m. on Starz]

Why we'll try to stay up and watch it: In the trailer for Role Models, Paul Rudd tells Elizabeth Banks: "You complete me. You had me at hello." Everyone watching the trailer immediately laughs knowingly. The reason? Jerry Maguire is the modern day version of Casablanca.

Stop giving us that look. Cameron Crowe's script is seemingly effortless in the way it comes up with iconic lines of dialogue. One after the other, they come streaming out of the movie like water from a busted pipe. While Jerry Maguire might not amount to a hill of beans-it's too long and fairly overcooked in the final act-it is as ingrained in our subconscious as any movie to come out in the last twelve years.

It's also a pretty good time. The story of a bitter sports agent who finds his heart and his soul mate, has enough to keep both men and women entertained for nearly its entire running time. Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise... nasally and blustery. He's a perfect on-screen visage for Super Agent Jerry Maguire. As Jerry's The One, Renee Zellweger is wonderful. We might take issue with some of her performances in recent years, but in Jerry Maguire she's endearing, warm and loveable. Seriously. We still have a crush on her character today.

When we'll probably fall asleep: We simply love when Tom Cruise acts like he's drunk. It frees him as an actor, making him more biting and less self-aware that he is Tom Cruise. In Jerry Maguire, Mr. Cruise's piece de resistance occurs 65 minutes in at 2:15 a.m. while he's talking to Ms. Zellweger's on-screen son, Ray (the criminally adorable Jonathan Lipnicki). Jerry is trying have a heart-to-heart, but Ray just keeps asking him to go to the zoo. Finally, the agent snaps: "Ray, the zoo? You know, the fucking zoo's closed." The only thing funnier than Tom Cruise drunk? Tom Cruise cursing at a child.

Mr. Cruise, of course, has been doing this for some time now, from nearly 20 years ago, when he danced in his briefs in Risky Business , and continuing with Top Gun , The Color of Money , Born on the Fourth of July , Rain Man , A Few Good Men , Mission: Impossible, M:I2 , Jerry Maguire and this year's Vanilla Sky , a near-bomb that he nearly single-handedly herded into the $100 million–gross territory.

He'll be 40 on July 3, and the media has generally agreed to state that he is the biggest star on the planet. He certainly has the look: Every one of his pictures is met with the deferential P.R. sound of non-rocking-the-boat commercial respect; the press is preconditioned, as it is with Disney World and Coca-Cola, to respect Mr. Cruise's professionalism and commercialism. And his performances are good-or at least, they're never bad . Other giant movie stars are capable of giving uncomfortable, unsuccessful performances-did you ever see Robert Redford in that movie with Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson, or Harrison Ford in Sabrina ? Anyone say Ishtar ? Not Mr. Cruise.

Besides, he is likable and as sleek and dark as Mickey Mouse was in his prime. Tom Cruise is the consummate professional: He does a lot of press, he shows up on time, he befriends the grip, he is a beautifully crafted movie star-particularly when he wears black-and at $30 million a picture, plus a percentage of the gross, possibly a bargain.

For Hollywood, Mr. Cruise is like an illustration of Warren Buffett's principle that you should always buy the leader in any category. It doesn't make it a sure thing, but it's damn close. For studios, he's a safety net on which a $100 million film can be settled and sold. How fitting that Minority Repor t is a futuristic thriller about predetermination-Mr. Cruise is, above all else, almost commercial predetermination itself.

For directors, he's a rock."He brings a focal point where all of the arrows point to the center," Mr. Spielberg said at the Ziegfeld, as he stepped away from the human mob surrounding his star.

That doesn't exactly explain Mr. Cruise's appeal, and here's where the man-boy thing comes in. Mr. Cruise has spent most of his professional career doing what may best be described as aspirational acting. From an early age, he has specialized in shiny actualizations of the young male ego-in almost all of his performances, he's been muscular, intense, cocksure, charming and self-deprecating. Indeed, he nearly pulled all of that off, wheelchair-bound, playing Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July . He looks great, he sounds great; sometimes you swear he even smells great. "He's done some wonderful stuff," James Lipton cooed after huddling with Mr. Cruise at the Minority Report after-party at Cipriani on 42nd Street. He is not the man hired to make anyone feel imperfect, or bad about the human condition. The 5-foot-7 Mr. Cruise is a little guy who doesn't play the little guy; he is popularity personified, and reminds no one of a person they ignored in high school.

Still, money and power and celebrity can be nasty buggers, and together they have conspired to trap Mr. Cruise in a neat box of fame that is good for the June 2002 market but possibly problematic for the actor himself over the long term. We are told repeatedly of how affable Mr. Cruise is by people who meet with him and know him, but to the public Mr. Cruise is now less a person than a fantastic performance car, fast and clean, with a controlled edge of recklessness. Nonrevealing interviews serve only to dehumanize him further: Mr. Cruise has become, essentially, a commodity, a living product placement. This came to mind during the opening of Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky , in which Mr. Cruise raced around a vacant Times Square, blitzed by flashing billboard advertisements and gyrating video teases. Theoretically, it was a statement about the infestation of commercial culture-but, of course, the best-known product on the screen was sweaty Mr. Cruise.

It is easy to say that Vanilla Sky brought Mr. Cruise a measure of humility; though the star has stood firmly behind it, the film earned just that $100 million (just!), was panned by confused critics, is spoken of fondly by few. That the film came shortly after Mr. Cruise's split from wife Nicole Kidman fueled the rumination that Mr. Invincible had been bumped. This tumult could have shed new light, shown a new side of Mr. Cruise-divorce, after all, humanizes everyone but the Gabors-but after a few conciliatory quotes about his marriage, and cracking down some more on those rumors about his sexuality, he dusted himself off and went back to the well-oiled Tom Cruise game plan. He's back to being rich and shiny and loved, and he's got a new girlfriend in the sleek, lithe Penélope Cruz-a Sharper Image girlfriend for a Sharper Image guy-and he's back in Minority Report , a booster-rocketed action film that may explain 2054, but won't answer the question "What will Tom Cruise be when he grows up?"

He needs to decide. At a certain age and level of accomplishment, every successful star actor must vanquish his or her past and try to become somebody else. In his mid-40's, Jimmy Stewart stopped being Mr. Smith and became Anthony Mann's growling, grizzly action hero, marrying Indian maidens and getting the crap beaten out of him. By his 40's, Tom Hanks, formerly a comic, started brooding and transformed himself into the Restoration Hardware version of Jimmy Stewart. (Such transformations don't always work, of course. Recently Jim Carrey decided to stop being an ass, only to become a bigger ass.)

Mr. Cruise is at a similar crossroads. He remains, on the cusp of his fifth decade, a youthful ideal, even as faint facial lines begin to appear and crow's feet form around his green eyes. He is, quite clearly, an adult, but still a tough sell as an adult. Perhaps this is why-rather than the knee-jerk belief that it would turn off audiences-Mr. Cruise has still yet to take that transformative role that allows boys to become men, as Paul Newman did in his late 30's with The Hustler and Hud . Mr. Cruise's potential breakout Hud -like role-his turn in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia as a misogynistic motivational coach ("Respect the cock! Tame the cunt!")-was too brief to be transformative.Besides Jerry Maguire , he also hasn't gotten a lot of adult laughs-which is fine, a great star can get away without that-but it makes one think about the difference between Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks. Mr. Hanks actually wears his pain on his face, on his gut, in his eyes. Mr. Cruise has pain also, but it's his anthracite, embedded-and we don't just know this from the interviews-somewhere back in his childhood. He ain't the first, of course: that Peter Pan was also a pretty pissed-off boy.

But fame, really, is what wedged Mr. Cruise into Pan-land. He began with a small part in Endless Love and played a military academy loony in Taps, but his definitive early role, of course, was Joel Goodson in Paul Brickman's Risky Business. Risky Business is perhaps the last honest teenage sex comedy-it's well acted, beautifully shot and sophisticated, and almost as predictive in its way as The Graduate had been 15 years earlier-and yet its star, then 21 years old, is not terribly far removed from the Tom we know today. The quiet confidence and the trademark nervous intensity, mostly the layered sense of aloneness-why do you think the eruptive dancing scene in the house is so powerful?-it's all there. But with it came the late-century sense of stressed beleaguerment: In one scene, Joel, harried about getting home to the brothel operating from his parents' house, stares at a school clock, only to see it flick backwards. Mr. Cruise lets out the kind of angry yet hilarious groan that became a Cruise staple-like his rants at Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man , his fist-pumping meltdown in the bathroom with Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire , his jump-kick in Vanilla Sky when surgeons present him with a plastic face prosthesis.

What made Mr. Cruise in Risky Business , of course, was the innocence he would then have to give up; the kid who slid across the floor in his white briefs singing into a candlestick while dancing to "Old Time Rock 'n' Roll" probably did not envision the superstar being summoned to play the Charlton Heston role at the 2002 Oscars: "Should we celebrate the joy and magic that movies bring? Well, dare I say it? More than ever."

Then again, maybe he would have: On the phone the other day, Mr. Brickman could still recall the young Mr. Cruise's ambition. He also recalled his "physicality"; Mr. Cruise was an ex-wrestler, and that dancer in the living room was no double.

"I think he was very courageous as an actor," Mr. Brickman said. "He would not really protect himself-he would throw himself into that character."

But the forces behind Risky Business proved to be less risk-oriented than their star; Mr. Brickman lost a fight with David Geffen over the movie's ending-Mr. Brickman wanted a bittersweet finale, with Joel getting rejected by Princeton-and still can't watch the shiny, happier conclusion without wincing. Of course, audiences ate it up and the movie went on to be a big hit, and it was the last movie Tom Cruise made before he was famous.The underrated All the Right Moves was next, then the small hiccup with Ridley Scott's Legend ; next, Top Gun, and then into the stratosphere.

After Top Gun, Mr. Cruise joined Paul Newman working for Martin Scorsese in The Color of Money , a surprisingly cunning movie in which Mr. Cruise, in the sequel to The Hustler , plays the takeover artist for Mr. Newman's cooled-down and beaten-down Fast Eddie Felson. Did Mr. Newman adopt Mr. Cruise on the set, take him stock-car racing, generally wise him up, Felson-style, and disabuse him of making bunk like Top Gun -which may have led Mr. Cruise to films like Born on the Fourth of July ? If he did, it took a while for Old Newman's admonitions to sink in, however, as Mr. Cruise went on next to Cocktail , his only real camp classic. Then came Rain Man , a good performance, but he was picking up Dustin Hoffman's toothpicks while Mr. Hoffman picked up the Oscar. Next came Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July, his first Oscar nomination. Then Days of Thunder , too boring to be camp.

This looks like C.A.A. calculation-high, low, high, low-but at this point, Mr. Cruise was just being a movie star playing Tom Cruise. On Far and Away , another stinker, he was Tom Cruise in a high-school play putting on a brogue, playing with Nicole Kidman. In The Firm , he was Tom Cruise at the firm. Interview with the Vampire -forgot about that, didn't you?-was a weird detour; in many respects, the dandy, effeminate Lestat was Mr. Cruise's most adventurous role.

Then Brian DePalma's ludicrous Mission: Impossible- a huge hit, no script, Cruise missile. Jerry Maguire , up next, the ultimate Tom as Tom role, where Cameron Crowe masterfully blurred the line between the title character and star. Jerry Maguire may be Mr. Cruise's finest performance-it's certainly the most likable-but it was not a heavy lift; he had a script, Mr. Crowe's Billy Wilder–worshipping office-establishing shots and Renée Zellweger as Jean Arthur. He had us at hello.

Then into the abyss: Mr. Cruise and Nicole Kidman went to London to work for Stanley Kubrick on what looked like the project of a lifetime, Eyes Wide Shut . Here was the movie that held the most promise of growing up Mr. Cruise into an adult, as he worked with the greatest living movie director. That it failed was partly the fault of a strange, hygienic prissiness that took over the movie-Mr. Cruise was surrounded by sex, desire and nudity but never let himself get down to real risky business. He is murky and tentative; you never get the sense he wants to drop his knickers. The wife plays it carnal, but for reasons that are impossible to know, Mr. Cruise plays it cute-Andy Hardy at an orgy.

The small role in Magnolia as T.J. Mackey, though, is damned good, the closest portrait of Mr. Cruise unbound, ironic in that character's penultimate scene is a stare-down with a reporter-a TV interviewer who has caught him making conflicting statements about his past. Mr. Cruise, of course, knows from interviewers, and when he violently gets up from his seat and says, "I gave you my fucking time, bitch," you want to itch, it feels so real.

Minority Report marks a mini-penance for both the Vanilla Sky Mr. Cruise and for Mr. Spielberg, whose posthumous Stanley Kubrick collaboration, last summer's gloppy A.I ., left many audiences seasick. Minority Report , based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, tells the story of a Washington D.C. police "precrime" unit-a detail assigned to arrest killers before they commit murder. They're aided by a trio of precognitive psychics-"precogs"-who backfloat in a curious hot tub and provide incriminating evidence of future actions.

Of course, the precogs turn out to be human, too. We learn pre-crime has its costs, and the timely thrust of Minority Report is the tension between technology, intelligence and freedom. Minority Report is not fiery-it's the opposite of an Oliver Stone number-but it is a movie for Americans in 2002; its purpose seems as much Stanley Kramer as Stanley Kubrick. And Mr. Spielberg said he wanted to make Mr. Cruise "not the center, but part of the whole." And though Mr. Cruise has to anchor Minority Report , however, the film does little to define Tom Cruise-except to restate his prowess at leaping off buildings.

It's odd to think of a 50-year-old Tom Cruise. He hasn't broken and chipped yet, like Clint Eastwood, or become a grizzled bearcub like Steve McQueen. Mr. Newman became a self-amused middle-aged superstar, thanks to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting , but his greatest moments showed up even later with The Verdict and The Color of Money . Because he is such a money magnet, it's certain Mr. Cruise will be asked to continue to make blockbusters, but he's still waiting for a Wes Anderson or Christopher Nolan or some baby auteur we haven't heard about yet-perhaps he or she is lurking in the Astor Place Starbucks right now, iMovie-ing up a whimsical part-to come along and pry Tom Cruise into daylight. He's too old to play Hamlet but he'd be better off not aging into real-life anime.

And here's his pre-cog: In 20 years, he'll slide across the Kodak Theater stage, Joel Goodson at 60, probably to collect some hardware-Mr. Spielberg said Monday night that in 20 years, Tom Cruise "should have two Oscars"-but mostly to receive congratulations for having cracked the code. What code? The code he first presented in Risky Business -the combination of sadness, anger and exuberance that has made his own imprint on the lonely and lacquered American personality.

romantic film clips: zipping around sunny Italy with a swarthy fellow whose

sole desire is to take you off the market ( Roman

Holiday ) … or having a miraculously evolved man burst in on you and your

many angry female friends and proclaim, "You complete me" ( Jerry Maguire ). What we forget are the movies that capture the more

sober side of relationships, like Persona,

the Bergman film where two psychologically tortured characters exist in black

and white, inhabiting bleak, sparsely furnished rooms, muttering in Swedish,

one speaking in prolonged chunks as the other seems poised for insanity. The

film that perfectly captures what I think of as the "Relationship Talk." The

talk that feels like the verbal equivalent of a hamster on a Habitrail wheel,

spinning away but going nowhere in a cage filled with various pieces of The New York Times and very little

water.

For many couples, talking has become the method of choice

when addressing bumps in the road. Believing that problems are caused by a lack

of communication, they turn to communication to fix them. Now, don't get me

wrong; I support talking. I love a hearty, abstract discussion peppered with

lines that begin, "I just feel like …" or "It hurt me when…." But as I embark

on my second year of being absolutely and completely single, I look at my

friends struggling in relationships and think maybe they're talking too much. I

used to talk that much-and now I'm absolutely and completely single.

Have we turned into a generation of talkaholics, who look to

words to solve every problem when other options might be better? Why are

couples talking so much these days?

"Women tend to be the instigators of the 'talks-about-us,'"

said a female movie producer. "But most of us fight the urge to ask, 'What are

you thinking?'-which we all know means, 'What are you thinking about me ?'"

A petite blonde chopped the air as she made a similar point.

"When women talk, we're giving certain signals that all we want is comfort.

Women pick that up; men don't. When I say to a female friend, 'I feel fat,' she

knows to say, 'You look amazing.' When I say it to my boyfriend, he says, 'Why

don't you go on a diet?'"

An Internet guy who looks like a portly Matthew Broderick

agreed that women say one thing, but want something else. "The only talking

women want is for men to say, 'I love you and cherish you and you are the

skinniest and prettiest.' All men want women to say is, 'I want to have sex

with another woman and you can watch.'" He continued, "Show me a woman of few

words and I'll show you a Muslim."

I did find one man-a friend who's had "two serious

four-month relationships in nine years"-who said he's usually the one who wants

to talk. "I like to talk about things," he told me. "I've been accused of

liking to talk about things too much, but I guess I just talk until the other

person realizes I'm right."

Like many New York men, he has only beer and Chinese-mustard

packets in his refrigerator.

Generally, the men I spoke with dreaded the heart-to-heart.

"If a woman tells me, 'Let's talk,'" a real estate broker said, "it's my cue to

go in the other direction."

"This requirement to 'be honest' about their feelings haunts

men, because men-honestly-simply do not know how they feel," said a musician

who's in analysis five days a week. "They will spend hours being grilled and

filleted by their female mates about how they feel, when some white lies and

some white wine make for a more pleasant evening."

Sensing that so many men have come to fear "a talk" more

than debating china patterns, women say that while they once believed couples

should discuss everything, now they're not so sure. A woman who asked to be

described as a "leggy model even though I'm not" said, "In the old days, when

sex roles were clearer, women didn't expect men to be their best friends. Now I

realize it's unfair to presume a man will fulfill so many roles. It's not

realistic to make this man your lying-around friend, your going-to-the-movies

friend, your telling-the-minutiae-of-the-day friend." When I asked another

woman how much couples should talk, she replied, "How much do you want to stay

in the relationship?"

Others felt that "laying everything on the table" was

putting women at a disadvantage. "Men need to be managed, " a freelance magazine writer said. "You don't want them to

see the strings."

A divorcée who dresses in chic ski outfits believes men view

so much talk as excessively needy, and that "men smell need on a woman like bad

perfume." She went on to say, "Men judge women for having needs because they

don't think they have needs-because

women always anticipate them."

Several women also said that, while they don't think lots of

talking is necessarily helping, it's tied into their idea of a strong woman.

"It seems somehow anti-feminist not to tell your mate everything these days," a

book-store manager sighed, examining a pimple she said was caused by stress.

"But I have to tell you, the minute I stopped playing games, he got scared."

An actress who worries that her biological clock is ticking

also mentioned the concept of the modern woman. "Women didn't talk about

relationships this much before the pill," she said. "Now they have control of

their bodies and when to have sex, so they can say what they want and walk away

if they have to."

Privately, many women are saying they're looking for

alternatives to the talkathon. "Men are uncomfortable with women coming at them

directly. They deal with that at work," the freelance writer said. "Now, when I

want to talk about something with my boyfriend, I make him a cocktail. Relax

him a little and then pounce."

Her friend smiled. "It's

so ironic," she said. "Men get women drunk to have sex with them and you're

getting your boyfriend drunk to talk."

When I asked for solutions, the only suggestion came from

the real estate broker: "More sex and silence." Well, in silent films, couples

relate in brief placards. An "I am struggling with issues about my parents'

marriage and how that affects me" is reduced to a brief "Help!" on-screen.

Another possibility is Quest For Fire ,

where mud-covered singles wander the earth content to pick nits out of each

other's fur and loiter in caves. Primitive, yes, but little need for couples'

counseling. Or maybe musicals have something to teach us. "My therapist says

you're controlling" would sound much better set to Cole Porter.

Perhaps the problem is not talking at all, but instead the

truth behind why we talk. "Women don't want talk

from talk," the actress said. "They think that, through talk, they can get

a man to change . But men only change

through evolution. So we've got another three billion years."

Cameron Crowe spent many hours talking with Billy Wilder. Mr. Crowe, writer and director of Singles and Jerry Maguire , met with his 93-year-old interlocutor at his office, came by his house, dined with Mr. Wilder and his wife, Audrey. Like François Truffaut, whose famous book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock inspired the Q.&A. format of Conversations With Wilder , Mr. Crowe was the very model of filial piety and persistence. But all this eagerly solicited conversation was not enough to bridge the chasm–intellectual and generational, if not metaphysical–between the two men.

One of the great directors of the Hollywood studio system, Mr. Wilder is an Austrian-Jewish immigrant whose sensibility was shaped by the ironical culture of Vienna and Berlin. He is a sophisticated collector of modern art and a scathing observer of American life. Mr. Crowe is a native Southern Californian, a former reporter for Rolling Stone who now directs blandly engaging Hollywood films larded with the American optimism that Mr. Wilder ridiculed throughout his career.

Mr. Crowe's questions are frequently inane or obvious, but I suspect he only played the dope in order to elicit Mr. Wilder's amusingly irritated rejoinders. I was reminded of Mr. Wilder's 1948 farce, A Foreign Affair , in which Jean Arthur, playing a naïvely sermonizing member of Congress from Kansas on a visit to war-ruined Berlin, gets a taste of reality when she encounters Marlene Dietrich in the role of a ravaged cabaret singer:

"Mr. Crowe (Jean Arthur to Mr. Wilder's Dietrich) asks how he was 'able to resist the temptation for schmaltz':

"B.W.: For what?

"C.C.: For schmaltz. Throughout your career.

"Wilder offers a rare smile, as if I've just told a dirty joke. Have I misused the word?"

Mr. Wilder doesn't respond directly to the question, because he was never thus tempted. The conventional wisdom is that he was a cynic. In fact, he was simply tough-minded. In Hollywood, genuine cynicism tends to wear the friendly mask of effusive sincerity–of schmaltz. A fine recent example of this masquerade is Mr. Crowe's Jerry Maguire , a Wilder-inspired Clinton-era parable in which a humiliated sports agent gets his groove back by getting in touch with his feelings and overcoming his "cynical, cynical world." In Jerry Maguire , there's nothing wrong with the system that a more sensitive "corporate culture" can't fix.

The zing in Mr. Wilder's best work derives, by contrast, from his depiction of a world where–as Shirley MacLaine explains to Jack Lemmon in The Apartment –you have the grim choice of being a "taker" or getting taken. Throughout the 40's and 50's, in romantic comedies, film noir, dramas, adventure films, war movies, biopics and farces, the writer-director skewered the pieties of postwar America. (The only genre he didn't try was the western–a stretch for most urban Jews, alas.) His protagonists were rogues, pushovers, murderers; the endings of his films were seldom happy in the conventional sense. He beat the studio system mainly by sticking to his guns. After the first screening of Sunset Boulevard , Mr. Wilder's film about a desiccated Hollywood star and her precociously burnt-out paramour, Louis B. Mayer said, "How dare this young man, Wilder, bite the hand that feeds him?" The young man in question overheard the remark, and sank his teeth in further: "Mr. Mayer, I am Mr. Wilder, and go fuck yourself."

If rudeness is a sign of health, then Mr. Wilder may be counted a robust nonagenarian. When Mr. Crowe called to ask whether he'd make a cameo appearance in Jerry Maguire , Mr. Wilder hung up. The young director rushed over to his office on Brighton Way to plead with him in person, taking along his leading man, Tom Cruise, for good measure. They were both shown to the door, where Mr. Wilder took the occasion to dress down his admirer. "'Nice to meet you, and nice to meet you,' he said in a courtly fashion. His gazed passed across me and stopped on Tom Cruise. 'Especially you.'" Mr. Crowe finally cajoled Mr. Wilder into doing a book–but the older man warned him, "The book is going to be like shit."

It's not, thanks in part to the stubborn Mr. Crowe but mostly to Mr. Wilder, who is a great talker: witty, cutting, perceptive. Listen to the way he handles Freud, whom he met as a young journalist in Vienna. The father of psychoanalysis kicked Mr. Wilder out of his apartment, but not before the young man caught a glimpse of the couch. "It was a very tiny little thing," he remembers. "All his theories were based on the analysis of very short people." Mr. Wilder was always good on such details. He says he began making films "because you live, actually you live 5, 10 or 15 or 20 different lives"–the filmmaker shares the reporter's restless search for vicarious experience.

The cunningly dopey Mr. Crowe asks if there's an afterlife. "I hope not," Mr. Wilder answers, "because there are so many shits that I've met in my life, I don't want to meet them again." Was he in love with Dietrich? "I was not. I do not fuck a star. That's a primary rule of mine … If I did have a real yen for that thing … then I fuck the stand-in." Is Audrey, his wife of the last 48 years, the love of his life? "She is kind of … 80 percent … What the other 20 percent is, I cannot tell you."

Born in 1906, Mr. Wilder arrived in Hollywood in 1934. (Three-quarters of his family, including his mother and grandmother, perished in concentration camps.) In 1939, he had his first hit, Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka , which he co-wrote with Charles Brackett, a patrician Republican. By the early 1940's, he was directing his own scripts and acquiring a privileged view of the workings of the studio system.

It's a pity that Mr. Crowe is a schmoozer rather than a critic. He's breathtakingly indiscriminate in his praise of Mr. Wilder's movies, which he calls "a treasure trove of flesh-and-blood individuals, all wonderfully alive" (a description that seems woefully inadequate when extended to William Holden's character in Sunset Boulevard , who narrates from the grave). In fact, Mr. Wilder is an ambiguous hero, part rebel, part conformist. He was a smasher of taboos and also a calculating crowd pleaser who increasingly pulled his punches when they threatened to graze the audience. Always more of a writer than a director, he created few lasting visual images: There is nothing in his repertoire to match the best work of his contemporaries John Ford and Orson Welles.

By the 1960's, with signs of intelligent new life in American cinema, Mr. Wilder's best work was behind him; his 50's irreverence seemed curiously tame in the face of a tumultuously changing American reality. When Mr. Crowe asks Mr. Wilder what the 60's were like for him, he replies, "I didn't even know they were the 60's." Pauline Kael wrote a vitriolic review in 1961 of Mr. Wilder's Cold War satire One, Two, Three : "Wilder hits the effects hard and sure; he's a clever, lively director whose work lacks feeling or passion or grace or beauty or elegance. His eye is on the dollar, or rather on success, on the entertainment values that bring in dollars." (Ironically, Ms. Kael's view that "vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery" precisely echoes Mr. Wilder's own convictions about filmmaking.) Around the same time, Dwight Macdonald wrote in The New Yorker that Mr. Wilder was "not cynical enough; he uses bitter chocolate for his icing, but underneath is the stale old cake."

I.A.L. Diamond, Mr. Wilder's writing partner from the late 50's through the early 80's, called Mr. Wilder's style "sweet and sour," a phrase that aptly describes the canon of Jewish comic films, from Mr. Wilder and the Marx Brothers to Woody Allen. I'm not sure whether Diamond was thinking of Chinese food, but it fits: At his worst, Billy Wilder gave us takeout–you left the theater titillated but oddly undernourished; at his best, in films like Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity , he laid out a full banquet, more sour than sweet.